Research Needs in Movement of Agricultural Chemicals to Groundwater

Better prediction of the movement of agricultural chemicals to groundwater is necessary to permit development of best management practices to reduce adverse environmental effects of agriculture. For pesticides, more research is needed on preferential flow, adsorption, retardation, half-life, and degradation products. Predictive modeling of pesticide movement will always be difficult because of the complexities of the processes and the fact that often only a very small amount of the pesticide applied will actually move to underlying groundwater.